The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Sheffiel...d grinds steel. They know the use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the greatest amount of benefit from both. The reading men are kept by hard walking, hard riding, and measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condition, and two days before the examination, do not work but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college doomsday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American... life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gent...lemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country- houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the Ovarian Theory of Literature, or, rather, its complement, the Testicular Theory. A recent camp follower ... of this explic...it theory is ... Norman Mailer, who has attributed his own gift, and the literary gift in general, solely and directly to the possession of a specific pair of organs. One writes with these organs, Mailer has said ... and I have always wondered with what shade of ink he manages to do it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world.... It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and the...n! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth--all these belong to the old period.... But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.... We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from ...the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again with Orpheus, and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to--MAmerica. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely,--whose gossip would be Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,--the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,--the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary--the twenty-fourth was the Cumæan Sibyl,--the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name,--the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,--the sixtieth was Eve, the mother of mankind. So much for the "Old woman that lives under the hill, And if she's not gone she lives there still." It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The canoe and yellow birch, beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman, but the spruce and fir, and pines generally, are Indian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universa...l than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then came the Lord Chamberlain with his white staff, And all the people began to laugh;... And then the Queen began to speak, 'You're welcome home, Sir Francis Drake.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »